In high school my friends and I had a basement drinking game called "System 32 Roulette." We had a fresh Windows 98 machine and you had to pick a file inside c:/windows/system32/ by random and forcibly delete it then reboot the machine. If the computer booted up and you could successfully get back to that folder, everyone else had to take a drink. If not, you had to finish your drink and then reinstall Windows.
I actually did something similar with the family computer and Windows 95. I didn't know anything about how computers work so I started deleting files and seeing if they were needed. I actually learned a little bit about the operating system from doing this.
To be fair, that's a standard way of debugging a problem. Cut away pieces of the program and see if the problem remains. Continue until you've isolated the fault.
Contrary to the sibling comment I absolutely adore this idea! I am definitely doing this sometime with my friends next time I can get them to come over to my place!
Windows 98 had that SFC (system file checker) feature which was supposed to restore bad or missing system files from the installation cab's. Of course, provided the sfc had its own .dlls still intact and the system could at least boot to prompt.
So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.
I wonder about the random part.. How did you achieve this ? Dice or something ? Be cause even with basic knowledge of the system it would have been easy (for a while) to delete only useless files.. It's à very original drinking game !
That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10.
It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?
I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change.
The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.
[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it. I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the side, which I've done for years in Windows.
Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do.
What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get UI from what feels like windows 98.
The new (and IMHO horrible) context menu in Explorer is exactly that.
You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it:
(For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)
The Windows 11 GUI was originally meant for a version of Windows called "Windows 10X", which was intended for low-powered devices that would compete with Chromebooks (hence the simplified, touch-centric design of the UI). Windows 10X was supposed to be a "legacy-free" OS that only ran UWP programs natively. Rather than using GDI, Win32, Explorer, etc. it used a brand new UI stack built on DirectX. This means that it required a compatibility layer to run Win32 programs, which were isolated from the OS. In mid-2021, Microsoft announced that they were cancelling Windows 10X in favor of bringing some of its features to regular Windows.
This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.
It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear, although that might’ve just been because during development they shipped both start menus.
It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.
My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click, old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key and is activated) and everything looked like W11.
Lots of things break if you move "C:\Program Files" to a different drive (and make it a mountpoint), updates try to RENAME from a temporary directory into it, but fails because it's a different filesystem instance. IIS used to also kernel panic in this case.
Continuing the model of "Distrust us every other release, we'll be good to you on the next one" Microsoft operating system model is getting insanely old.
You can have continued progress without choosing the off-release to fist your consumers.
Is it really the same? Or more like `rm -rf /usr` ? Was this folder always required to maintain the integrity of the system, or is this a more recent thing?
At least with linux there's ways where you could fix that. I personally probably wouldn't as it's a hassle and my home folder is on a separate partition anyways, so a clean install doesn't lose me much.
For those interested in the how anyway: You'd boot into a liveCD, Chroot into the installs root folder, and apt-get python2.7. If removing python breaks apt there's probably some flag to apt-get to get it to poke at a not-root folder you could use. Worst case you copy the python install from the liveCD, reboot, and then fix python from the booted system using a now-working apt.
I've been battling with Microsoft for control over my machine for decades and I don't use any of its OSes later than Windows 7, and then only to a limited extent since sufficient Linux and Android apps have been available to replace once-essential Windows ones.
First, my requirements: what I need of an OS is a file launcher for my apps and a means of access to my files and not much else. I even consider networking and TCP etc. additional to my basic requirements—yes, I require them, but they ought to take the form of a separate installable application which I should be able to select from a range of similar products. I have no control over developers who develop apps for Win32/64 APIs so if I want to use their applications then I'm usually obliged to use MS Windows—and that's the problem—I'm forced to hack Windows as Microsoft puts hundreds of roadblocks in my way and makes it almost impossible for me to both achieve a minimum system optimized for my requirements and to stop the company spying on me or selling my personal data.
I've never been happy with just Administrator rights as it's too restrictive, to hack Windows properly I want superuser rights, and to achieve at least some aspects of it, I'll sometimes go to the trouble of deleting unnecessary Windows features holus-bolus and or nuking or mutilating Microsoft's constant and increasing roadblocks that attempt me from doing so. Sometimes my efforts are very successful, other times not.
The trouble is, for me an operating system is only a means to an end (I've little interest in the workings of Microsoft's proprietary code as its forever changing and I've too few resources to be fully proficient and constantly up-to-date year after year). This poses a dilemma, as (a) I often need a hack in a hurry, (b) I don't have the time or sufficient knowledge to spend ages reverse engineering/disassembling the code, and (c), as there is usually precious little really useful information about what I'm trying to achieve available on the internet, my attempts to achieve them are often by brute force and brutal (BTW, I'm never worried about crashing the OS as I can stream it from a backup in minutes and no data is lost as anything of importance is stored on separate drives).
This is a huge subject of which not much appears on the Web, that's why this story's video is important even though it's very superficial and tells us very little of what we actually need to know to do the job properly. It seems to me that much of what I'm about to mention doesn't get mentioned because either websites are either scared of publishing stuff that's highly likely to end up producing an irreversible crash or BSOD and or that those who discover truly powerful ways of taming Windows deliberately do not tell others (knowledge is power after all).
What follows is just a very short bullet list of ideas and things I do to give the flavor and it's far from complete (my notes on how I modify Windows for my own use extends to many hundreds of pages). Moreover, what I mention here does not extend to every Windows installation I do (they all have different uses and the need for integrity, security etc. varies with each installation). If anyone has any ideas, links to hack sites etc. then I'd be most grateful to hear from you.
1. First, although the Dark Web is likely to have much more sophisticated solutions that I'd really like to know about I don't go there for answers—certainly not so in recent years—for all the obvious reasons.
2. One thing that's obvious from the video is that the later versions of Windows 10 and 11 are much more solid operating systems than earlier ones, a BSOD on say Windows 10 is much less likely than on Windows 7. The video shows us that and it's also my own experience (whilst I only use Win 7 I've spent time attempting to hack later ones including Win 10 (but not 11) to the extent that I would consider them suitable to use (at this point I still consider it unusable).
What's important here however is that whilst Windows 10 and up have more inbuilt Microsoft trash the fact that the basic operating system (its core) is now much more solid means that users can hack it with much less chance of total failure (the video clearly shows that). Remember, years ago Mark Russinovich made the comment that the essential Windows core files only amount to some 40 to 60MB, so I reckon all the rest is fair game for serious hacking. With that in mind we really need to ask how the fuck can a full version of Windows amount to an enormous 7 gigabytes or so (when one thinks about it, it truly is outrageous—so is the fact that we users are so acquiescent in complying with Microsoft and letting it get away with subjecting us to so much crap).
3. The video shows the problem of deleting both directories and files because the operating system locks them. Anyone who remembers the lack of adequate file/network locking in the '80s will recall all the effort that went into bootstrapping them to ensure that locked files cannot be casually unlocked. Unfortunately, whilst clearly important for stability, it can, at other times, be a curse such as when one's trying to delete some feature that Microsoft does not want you to remove. Of course, file and directory permissions play a big hand in this too. (I've many ideas for inventive hackers on how file-locking ought to be hacked.)
This used to drive me mad until I found a quick, albeit dirty, solution. If you want to delete Windows directories or files locked by either file locking or permissions then boot up a Linux disk or Linux utility such as Parted Magic and use its file manager. Problem solved, we can now delete anything at will. When I was testing Windows 10 I deleted great swathes of files and directories and was essentially able to remove all the useless add-ons and utilities without affecting the stability of operating system in the slightest. This way, I even made many hacks to the desktop, some with considerable success, others not (I've more to do on this when I've time). I could provide much more info about it but obviously I can't do so here. That's not to say I'm very knowledgeable, in fact I know much less than I ought to know about it, and info from others about which Windows file does what and what the consequences are of deleting it, etc. would be very useful to know.
4. This brings me to the need for resources. In the past there were re-compilations of Windows CDs in which much of the dross had been removed and key setup changes made. This was a quick way of cleaning up much of Windows in advance of it being installed. I've not seen any of these disks for Windows 10 (although I've not looked of late), does anyone know what the status of such CDs is?
What's needed for the game and adventurous like me is a dedicated Website that lists all these super-hacks together with info and user experiences. If anyone knows of any then please let me know. Here, I'm referring to sites that are likely to be headed with words to the effect 'Don't proceed further with this website if you are worried that taking our advice may brick your Windows OS', after all sites dedicated to rooting Android phones are full of such warnings.
Such sites would also provide hacks such as how to change 'stubborn' permissions and unlock files (and advise which files the invaluable tool Unlocker cannot unlock and why it cannot do so—that said, I couldn't live with Unlocker, every Windows user ought to install it)! Similarly, we need a Windows 10 version of the now-defunct and once invaluable tool X-Setup Pro, it was invaluable because it actually showed the actual registry patches/hacks before it applied them (and the app had many hundreds of such useful patches builtin).
I could go on as there's much more but it'll have to for now.
Edit: the video presenter shows surprise that the Windows 11 user interface is built upon Windows 10 UI. This I did not know but I am not at all surprised as I do know that Microsoft has been up to these tricks since at least Windows 7. With Windows 7 Microsoft eliminated Quick Launch from the TaskBar but with a little effort it was easily brought back (I still use it, it's one of the first mods I do to a Win 7 installation).
What I find so very damn annoying about this finding is that the Win 10 UI is alive and well and hidden within the Win 11 one. Thus, there is absolutely no reason why users should not be able to select a UI from an older (or previous version) when upgrading (here users should be able to retain the Win 10 UI). Clearly, this is only bloody-mindedness on Microsoft's part that they cannot do so. Think back to Windows 8 and Metro: imagine how much trouble Microsoft could have avoided if users who hated Metro could have simply selected/kept the Windows 7 UI.
That this was not possible because of an internal Microsoft policy decision tells us much about its corporate strategy. I've claimed for years that Microsoft's policy of forcing disruptive change onto users without option is both deliberate and authoritarian. Unfortunately, this deliberate tactic of 'Disruption' is much of the reason for why there's so much trouble on the internet now. Simply, these arrogant bastards think they know it all when often they haven't a bloody clue.
Can I use this thread about Windows to vent a bit? I don't use Windows but what a gigantic clusterfuck of a turd. Mother in law now wants "two monitors instead of one". Whatever... I took a PC with Windows 8.1, bought a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter (GPU has got two output but her monitors are only HDMI) and it's kinda ok but then "Windows 8.1 support expires on 2023-jan-10". OK, let's buy Windows 11. I try to install Windows 11, had to create a boot disk or something (because why not) using Ventoy in wich I put the Windows .iso (just dd'ing the .iso as with Linux won't be sufficient apparently) and I happily launch the install. Hardware not supported by Windows 11.
OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11 on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: "Hardware not supported by Windows 11'. WTF. That 3700X is a recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it just says "hardware not supported".
Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR / employee per year).
Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law? Ubuntu.
I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.
It's insane: you want to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don't let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not supported, they just say: "Hardware not supported".
So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and OS X laptops for when they're on the go.
All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that Microsoft doesn’t support old stuff forever… guess how long old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it’s not forever)
Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don’t advertise it, but the licensing server still accepts old licenses.
Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb…
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whichdan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nakts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codetrotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoomablemind|3 years ago|reply
So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sacnoradhq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zfxfr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway71271|3 years ago|reply
i installed windows 98 so many times i still remember the pirated serial number k4hvd-q9tj9-6crx9-c9g68-qr2d3
and then cdc's bo2k came out and everything changed!
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakub_jo|3 years ago|reply
or something like that :-)
[+] [-] hbn|3 years ago|reply
It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?
[+] [-] puffoflogic|3 years ago|reply
The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.
[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
[+] [-] anoonmoose|3 years ago|reply
Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do.
What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
[+] [-] TrevorJ|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumboza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it:
https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win...
(For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)
[+] [-] ndiddy|3 years ago|reply
This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.
[+] [-] easton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matchagaucho|3 years ago|reply
Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.
[+] [-] ThatMedicIsASpy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
No one really knows, and Cutler won't say or doesn't know, himself.
[+] [-] liminal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cainxinth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] popcalc|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/tiagoad/suicide-linux
https://esoteric.codes/blog/suicide-linux
[+] [-] phist_mcgee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkeene2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daguava|3 years ago|reply
You can have continued progress without choosing the off-release to fist your consumers.
[+] [-] MikeTheGreat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gradstudent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriram_malhar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Doxin|3 years ago|reply
For those interested in the how anyway: You'd boot into a liveCD, Chroot into the installs root folder, and apt-get python2.7. If removing python breaks apt there's probably some flag to apt-get to get it to poke at a not-root folder you could use. Worst case you copy the python install from the liveCD, reboot, and then fix python from the booted system using a now-working apt.
[+] [-] cuteboy19|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidfunc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] permo-w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sinuhe69|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilbert42|3 years ago|reply
First, my requirements: what I need of an OS is a file launcher for my apps and a means of access to my files and not much else. I even consider networking and TCP etc. additional to my basic requirements—yes, I require them, but they ought to take the form of a separate installable application which I should be able to select from a range of similar products. I have no control over developers who develop apps for Win32/64 APIs so if I want to use their applications then I'm usually obliged to use MS Windows—and that's the problem—I'm forced to hack Windows as Microsoft puts hundreds of roadblocks in my way and makes it almost impossible for me to both achieve a minimum system optimized for my requirements and to stop the company spying on me or selling my personal data.
I've never been happy with just Administrator rights as it's too restrictive, to hack Windows properly I want superuser rights, and to achieve at least some aspects of it, I'll sometimes go to the trouble of deleting unnecessary Windows features holus-bolus and or nuking or mutilating Microsoft's constant and increasing roadblocks that attempt me from doing so. Sometimes my efforts are very successful, other times not.
The trouble is, for me an operating system is only a means to an end (I've little interest in the workings of Microsoft's proprietary code as its forever changing and I've too few resources to be fully proficient and constantly up-to-date year after year). This poses a dilemma, as (a) I often need a hack in a hurry, (b) I don't have the time or sufficient knowledge to spend ages reverse engineering/disassembling the code, and (c), as there is usually precious little really useful information about what I'm trying to achieve available on the internet, my attempts to achieve them are often by brute force and brutal (BTW, I'm never worried about crashing the OS as I can stream it from a backup in minutes and no data is lost as anything of importance is stored on separate drives).
This is a huge subject of which not much appears on the Web, that's why this story's video is important even though it's very superficial and tells us very little of what we actually need to know to do the job properly. It seems to me that much of what I'm about to mention doesn't get mentioned because either websites are either scared of publishing stuff that's highly likely to end up producing an irreversible crash or BSOD and or that those who discover truly powerful ways of taming Windows deliberately do not tell others (knowledge is power after all).
What follows is just a very short bullet list of ideas and things I do to give the flavor and it's far from complete (my notes on how I modify Windows for my own use extends to many hundreds of pages). Moreover, what I mention here does not extend to every Windows installation I do (they all have different uses and the need for integrity, security etc. varies with each installation). If anyone has any ideas, links to hack sites etc. then I'd be most grateful to hear from you.
1. First, although the Dark Web is likely to have much more sophisticated solutions that I'd really like to know about I don't go there for answers—certainly not so in recent years—for all the obvious reasons.
2. One thing that's obvious from the video is that the later versions of Windows 10 and 11 are much more solid operating systems than earlier ones, a BSOD on say Windows 10 is much less likely than on Windows 7. The video shows us that and it's also my own experience (whilst I only use Win 7 I've spent time attempting to hack later ones including Win 10 (but not 11) to the extent that I would consider them suitable to use (at this point I still consider it unusable).
What's important here however is that whilst Windows 10 and up have more inbuilt Microsoft trash the fact that the basic operating system (its core) is now much more solid means that users can hack it with much less chance of total failure (the video clearly shows that). Remember, years ago Mark Russinovich made the comment that the essential Windows core files only amount to some 40 to 60MB, so I reckon all the rest is fair game for serious hacking. With that in mind we really need to ask how the fuck can a full version of Windows amount to an enormous 7 gigabytes or so (when one thinks about it, it truly is outrageous—so is the fact that we users are so acquiescent in complying with Microsoft and letting it get away with subjecting us to so much crap).
3. The video shows the problem of deleting both directories and files because the operating system locks them. Anyone who remembers the lack of adequate file/network locking in the '80s will recall all the effort that went into bootstrapping them to ensure that locked files cannot be casually unlocked. Unfortunately, whilst clearly important for stability, it can, at other times, be a curse such as when one's trying to delete some feature that Microsoft does not want you to remove. Of course, file and directory permissions play a big hand in this too. (I've many ideas for inventive hackers on how file-locking ought to be hacked.)
This used to drive me mad until I found a quick, albeit dirty, solution. If you want to delete Windows directories or files locked by either file locking or permissions then boot up a Linux disk or Linux utility such as Parted Magic and use its file manager. Problem solved, we can now delete anything at will. When I was testing Windows 10 I deleted great swathes of files and directories and was essentially able to remove all the useless add-ons and utilities without affecting the stability of operating system in the slightest. This way, I even made many hacks to the desktop, some with considerable success, others not (I've more to do on this when I've time). I could provide much more info about it but obviously I can't do so here. That's not to say I'm very knowledgeable, in fact I know much less than I ought to know about it, and info from others about which Windows file does what and what the consequences are of deleting it, etc. would be very useful to know.
4. This brings me to the need for resources. In the past there were re-compilations of Windows CDs in which much of the dross had been removed and key setup changes made. This was a quick way of cleaning up much of Windows in advance of it being installed. I've not seen any of these disks for Windows 10 (although I've not looked of late), does anyone know what the status of such CDs is?
What's needed for the game and adventurous like me is a dedicated Website that lists all these super-hacks together with info and user experiences. If anyone knows of any then please let me know. Here, I'm referring to sites that are likely to be headed with words to the effect 'Don't proceed further with this website if you are worried that taking our advice may brick your Windows OS', after all sites dedicated to rooting Android phones are full of such warnings.
Such sites would also provide hacks such as how to change 'stubborn' permissions and unlock files (and advise which files the invaluable tool Unlocker cannot unlock and why it cannot do so—that said, I couldn't live with Unlocker, every Windows user ought to install it)! Similarly, we need a Windows 10 version of the now-defunct and once invaluable tool X-Setup Pro, it was invaluable because it actually showed the actual registry patches/hacks before it applied them (and the app had many hundreds of such useful patches builtin).
I could go on as there's much more but it'll have to for now.
Edit: the video presenter shows surprise that the Windows 11 user interface is built upon Windows 10 UI. This I did not know but I am not at all surprised as I do know that Microsoft has been up to these tricks since at least Windows 7. With Windows 7 Microsoft eliminated Quick Launch from the TaskBar but with a little effort it was easily brought back (I still use it, it's one of the first mods I do to a Win 7 installation).
What I find so very damn annoying about this finding is that the Win 10 UI is alive and well and hidden within the Win 11 one. Thus, there is absolutely no reason why users should not be able to select a UI from an older (or previous version) when upgrading (here users should be able to retain the Win 10 UI). Clearly, this is only bloody-mindedness on Microsoft's part that they cannot do so. Think back to Windows 8 and Metro: imagine how much trouble Microsoft could have avoided if users who hated Metro could have simply selected/kept the Windows 7 UI.
That this was not possible because of an internal Microsoft policy decision tells us much about its corporate strategy. I've claimed for years that Microsoft's policy of forcing disruptive change onto users without option is both deliberate and authoritarian. Unfortunately, this deliberate tactic of 'Disruption' is much of the reason for why there's so much trouble on the internet now. Simply, these arrogant bastards think they know it all when often they haven't a bloody clue.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|3 years ago|reply
OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11 on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: "Hardware not supported by Windows 11'. WTF. That 3700X is a recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it just says "hardware not supported".
Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR / employee per year).
Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law? Ubuntu.
I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.
It's insane: you want to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don't let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not supported, they just say: "Hardware not supported".
So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and OS X laptops for when they're on the go.
[+] [-] trap_goes_hot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|3 years ago|reply
This is the first result when you google Windows 11 requirements. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that Microsoft doesn’t support old stuff forever… guess how long old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it’s not forever)
Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don’t advertise it, but the licensing server still accepts old licenses.
Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb…